Physicist: This was an interesting back-and-forth, so the original questions are italicized.
What was the energy at the start of the universe and how did it create matter?
If the question is “how much?” or “where did it come from?”, the answers are unfortunately “a hell of a lot” and “we can only guess”. These are still very open questions. There are lots of clever guesses, but there isn’t much solid, direct data to pick out which guesses are good.
As for how it became matter, that’s “easy”: when you get enough energy in one place, new particles form spontaneously. If the new particle has mass m, then the energy present is reduced by mc2. This is Einstein’s famous energy/mass conversion rate: E=mc2.
Kinetic energy (the energy of movement) is the easiest way to concentrate a lot of energy in one place. That’s why we use “particle accelerators” like CERN to slam particles together, instead of using huge lasers or lenses or anything else. We can get individual particles moving so fast that they carry many thousands of times their mass-equivalent in kinetic energy. When they do slam together all of that energy is released as a burst of new particles plus the kinetic energy of those (typically very fast) particles plus some light.
The trajectories of newly formed particles flying away from the collision of two gold nuclei. When describing these events, CERN scientists inevitably make “explodey sounds” with their mouths.
The early universe was so hot that all of the particles flying around were moving at particle-accelerator speeds and new particles were generated continuously. However, when we (people) make new particles they always appear in matter/anti-matter pairs, so how the universe has managed to have more matter than anti-matter is a mystery.
Or rather, since we’re not going to call ourselves “anti-matter”, it’s a mystery how the universe managed to not be balanced between… the two types of matter.
Is this energy stable or not, and if it isn’t how do you make it stable?
You can produce new matter with any kind of energy, so pick your favorite. There’s no such thing as pure energy, so whatever form you choose will be one of the regular, boring types: hot water, moving stuff, light, etc. and the way you’d store it to make it stable is just as dull: charged battery, stretched spring, spinning flywheel, etc.
However, generating matter takes an colossal amount of energy. The Hiroshima bomb was around a gram’s worth of energy. Humanity consumes the equivalent of around 5-10 metric tons of energy per year (that’s a lot more than I had been expecting before looking it up). You could create enough matter to make a sandwich, or you could power New York City for about a year instead. Moral is: if you need matter, go out and collect it.
And also is it possible to contain this amount of energy in an enclosed space? (eg. a spaceship)
The greatest power source we’ll ever reasonably have access to is hydrogen to helium fusion, which converts about 0.7% of the hydrogen’s mass into energy, leaving 99.3% as helium. So (assuming perfect efficiency), if you want to turn energy into matter, starting with more than 100 times as much hydrogen is a good place to start.
When matter falls into black holes, it tends to spiral in dense, extremely hot disks of gas first. This gas gets hot enough that it radiates in the x-ray spectrum (the hotter something is, the bluer the light it emits and x-rays are… way to blue to see). Under ideal conditions, matter falling into a rapidly spinning black hole can radiate the equivalent of about 40% of their mass.
This isn’t a great system. At the end of the day, you’re throwing away matter to create the energy for less matter and you’re doing it as close as you can get to a black hole, which is a famously unpleasant place to be.
So if you want to store a lot of energy on a spacehip, it needs to have massive hydrogen fuel tanks, and if you want to use your fuel efficiently than fusion would allow, then you need a black hole too.
And what type of matter would it produce?
Newly created matter is a random assortment of all the fundamental particles it’s possible to create at the given energies. For example, an electron (the lightest particle) has a mass equivalent of about 0.5 megaelectronvolts, which is the energy gained by a particle accelerated by half a million volts. That means that if your accelerator uses slightly more than a million volts, then you’ll be making electron/positron pairs (positrons are anti-electrons), and if it uses less than a million volts to accelerate its particles, then you’re just making light. It’s possible to “dial in” particular particles by carefully choosing the speed and type of the particles in your accelerator, but even then you’re not going to be creating cats and dogs or even entire atoms; just lots of individual fundamental particles.
Most fundamental particles are extremely unstable and decay very rapidly into radiation and the few stable particles: protons, electrons, and their anti-particles. Neutrons aren’t stable on their own, but they last for about 15 minutes before decaying, which is more than enough time to use them. So that’s ultimately the answer to what kind of matter we can create: protons, neutrons, and electrons (and their anti-particles).
When those protons and electrons are slowed down after their violent creation, you can make hydrogen or even deuterium (hydrogen with an extra neutron), but that’s the most advanced matter-creation ever achieved. There aren’t presently any prospects for doing better.
The inevitable half of the new matter made up of anti-particles will go on to annihilate whatever normal matter it runs into, so it either needs to be thrown out or stored very carefully. Preferably stored. After all the trouble of creating new matter, you don’t want to just throw out half of it (destroying a bunch of perfectly serviceable matter somewhere else in the process).
And also whether oxygen will be produced?
Nope! Or at least, almost nope. Individual protons and neutrons, sure. Hydrogen with some effort, yes. But in order to create a useful amount of heavier elements, existing matter needs to be fused (through fusion). The inside of stars is presently the only environment where it seems to be possible to create elements above helium in any abundance. We’re nowhere remotely close to fusing elements above hydrogen in our fusion reactors. Even the Sun is incapable of fusing helium into anything bigger. Near the end of its life, as it runs out of hydrogen fuel and its core collapses, the Sun will briefly fuse helium, but even then it won’t make oxygen.
It’s hard to convey how difficult it is to build the atoms that go into building people. The oxygen in the air you’re breathing right now has already had a hell of a life, born riding a supernova shock wave out of the core of a star and into interstellar space.
The natural sources of all the elements. Artificial elements are created atom by atom, and almost everything else is made in supernovas and neutron star collisions.
Artificial isotopes can be created by bombarding existing isotopes with “slow” neutrons, some of which stick to the nuclei of the target material’s atoms. Just like the creation of particles, this is a random and extremely inefficient process. Technically you can make oxygen, a few atoms at a time, by using the neutrons your particle accelerator accidentally created. But this is a long way from being a source of breathable air.
Elements (the number of protons) increases upward and the number of neutrons increases to the right. Every isotope that isn’t black is radioactive and will decay into another isotope according to the rules in the box. The big tool we have for making new nuclei is neutron bombardment, which moves an atom one to the right. Starting from hydrogen, a couple of neutrons will get you to tritium (“3H” on the bottom row) which decays to helium-3 (“3He”). With a spectacular burst of neutrons you can get a few atoms to jump helium-5 and lithium-6 (the “!!!” squares) before they decay in the “wrong direction” and then neutron bombardment and beta- decay will eventually get you to oxygen. But not in any hurry.
So if you want to make oxygen efficiently, you really need to blow up a star bigger than the Sun. Just start with several solar-system’s worth of hydrogen, pack it together into a star, let it simmer for a few million years until it supernovas, then collect and sort what comes flying out. Easy.
If your spaceship is big enough to hold a black hole for power and a couple massive stars for fusion, then you can create oxygen. But at some point you have to step back and ask what the spaceship is for. As long as you’re slinging stars around, why not grab a nice planet to live on while you’re at it?
And that’s why we can’t have replicators or transporters for meaningful applications. What a bummer.
So what are the physical laws which define what particle(s) will be created for given energy and given circumstances? And how are those particles created from the kinetic energy? Or all scientists know is: “a hell lot of random particles are created from a hell lot of random energy?”
> Starting from hydrogen, a couple of neutrons will get you to lithium (“3H” on the bottom row) which decays to helium-3 (“3He”).
Last figure legend. Hydrogen + couple neutrons is tritium, not lithium.
You write so well! Thank you!
Nicely stated article. The ‘where elements come from’ Periodic Table is great, I hadn’t seen it presented that way before. I kind of knew, but never saw a compilation.
My understanding of particle accelerators, such as CERN, is that they don’t spontaneously form new particles with the addition of energy, rather they spontaneously reveal the smaller constituents of those in the collision (Bosons, et. al.).
Energy is the ability to do work. Ability is a quality and hence it is a functional entity. Functional entities have no real existence; they exist only in the minds of rational beings and in mathematical analyses.
Mass is a mathematical relation between external force on a body and the body’s acceleration in the direction of the force. As mass is a relation, it is also a functional entity.
A real particle has matter as its content. Matter provides it with objective reality and positive existence in space. No mechanisms can covert the functional entity of energy into another functional entity of mass or into a real entity (matter).
Matter exists. No new matter is ever created. It may be transformed into different forms.
See: http://vixra.org/pdf/1712.0373v1.pdf
Where is the anti matter?
When you look at matter as waves then re read this quote from the above:
However, when we (people) make new WAVES, (instead of particles), they always appear in MATTER / ANTI MATTER WAVES which are waves and their mirror image waves (instead of matter/anti-matter pairs), so how the universe has managed to have more matter than anti-matter MAY NOT BE (instead of, is) a mystery.
Waves and anti waves are just a wave and its mirror image wave that when they meet they cancel each other out in destructive interference.
Looking at waves instead of particles may give new insights.
@Leo
The laws that govern both the creation and interaction of particles is the “standard model of particle physics”. While “fundamental uncertainty” is woven into quantum mechanics at a very foundational level, we can predict the probability of one interaction vs. another. So while we can’t say “this will be the result” we can predict the probability of each of the many results (and through understanding why those probabilities are what they are, we can increase or decrease the likelihood of particular outcomes).
@Dan
They do both. The constituent particles dictate what new particles will be created, which directions they’ll go, how fast, and in what proportions. So we can study the insides of single protons not by looking at protons themselves, but by slamming them together and measuring the thousands of new particles that result. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of noise in this and a lot of careful note-taking that needs to be done. That’s why the particle tube at CERN is smaller than a finger, while the detectors for catching all of the new particles are half a dozen stories tall.
@tehcrash
Thank you for catching that!
@Dan
@Nainan
The University of Michigan claims they have managed to “Boil the Vacuum”. That is, to create positron electron pairs using a laser based table top particle accelerator.
if the following extract is true:
“Dark matter is identified as negative relative energy between quarks in a proton and is generated in cold hydrogen gas with pressure gradient in gravitational field. Positive relative energy PRE can be generated between quarks in protons in cold hydrogen gas in outskirts of the universe.”
I got this from the following website:
https://scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=107122#:~:text=Dark%20matter%20is%20identified%20as%20negative%20relative%20energy,cold%20hydrogen%20gas%20in%20outskirts%20of%20the%20universe.”
So, was there no dark matter before the creation of Hydrogen during the big bang event?
When was the first dark matter created?
Under what conditions was the first ‘cold hydrogen’ produced>
If e=mc squared then does dark e = dark m c squared?
Does this involve the same light c or is their a ‘dark c’?
If dark matter makes up the majority of the ‘substance’ of the universe then does that not require an awful lot of ‘cold hydrogen’?
If dark matter has mass. Does this mass have the same properties as the mass of
‘normal’ matter and therefore does the mass of dark matter come from interaction with the Higgs field and the Higgs boson?
@SKelly
Those first hyper hot photons had to lose energy. Since they’re embedded is space then the expansion of space stretches them. They lose energy which becomes dark matter (mass). Nothing else needed.
@physicist
This site has its own entanglement. The name field messes up the comment scrolling. I’m limited to 6 lines with my phone. Please correct. Thank you.
@THendricks
A matter wave for say an electron would have to have mass and charge as part of it. Same for the positron. So you can’t wave them away. Never seen one actually described. Mythical?
Consider this: by definition photons are outside of distance and time. That means that the distance between any two photons in the universe is zero and so all photons are both outside of space and time.
That suggests that there is a dimensionless point (what I call Dimp) that contains all photons (all ele4ctromagnetic energy.)
Further the universe as we know it, was a somewhat small subset that broke away from DIMP in the Big Bang.
Further that this DIMP was always there before, during and after the Big Bang.
DIMP, is a dimensionless point that has all electromagnetic energy outside of time and distance – so in a dimensionless point.
Take the above and speculate: There are only TWO forces, not four.
The Big Bang occurs and the other force ANTI GRAVITY breaks free from DIMP, starts time, and through inflation, turns virtual particles into real particles. That energy cools into matter / gravity that DIMP tries to reign in. DIMP pulls back.
The other force
ANTI GRAVITY separates, spreads out. Anti gravity = Dark Energy.
Though surprising, most of this is an interpretation of the facts we know now, with my speculation stirred in.
Pretty sure of the first part – second part is much more speculative!
Maybe not. remember for every particle in particle physics there is a wave physics – and just like a particle must show spin, charge, etc. – so must a wave.
But HOW. Recently , this month, I’ve come up with something somewhat unique.
Take any wave – My suggestion is that the crests are positive charge, and the troughs are negative charge. That includes ALL waves!
Strange idea? We’ll play it out – do some thought experiments – draw two waves that are constructive interference, and draw two waves in destructive interference. Try it with both having crests and troughs, all positive, or both all negative, or one all positive and the other wave all negative – none of those scenarios get you the results of constructive interference or destructive interference when the waves come together.
But when a positive crest alternates with a negative trough – then both constructive and destructive interference works!!!
Try it!
‘Photons don’t age’ is relative. Statements such as ‘outside of distance and time’ or ‘The distance between all photons is zero’ are notional. If I travelled at light speed then time dilation states that ‘relative to some frames of reference, I will not age.’ But I will age in my own frame of reference and I will age at the same rate as I do now. Travelling at light speed or near it will not increase your lifespan. For you, time will pass at the same rate. So a photon does experience distance and time in its own reference frame. The fact that it doesn’t seem to from our frame of reference is not as exciting as it seems.
@THendricks
So show me two matter waves interfering. Be careful you don’t confuse matter waves and standing waves.
…
Q: How is matter created? Can we create new matter and would that be useful?
A: Yes. We can make stuff with it.
I finally figured it out a week ago while isolated in my covid retreat. All matter (usually atoms) comes from the more compact building blocks before them, helium from hydrogen for instance. But where does hydrogen come from? Hydrogen comes from broken neutrons. Collapsed neutrons, aka half-life at work.
Free neutrons don’t explode, they implode from gravity… because sans protons, there is nothing (no weak interaction) to stop, or retard, them. Gravity is both the weakest and strongest fundamental force as we all know. Any free neutrons slowly shrink so small, they eventually pass through the zero-point cone-of-time to where all the matching relative anti-matter lives. I say slowly (10 min) because just like all neutron stars, the ‘surface gravity’ of a single, tiny neutron is proportionately horrendous-in-miniature of course, and is ‘falling’ into it’s wanna-be tiny black hole configuration, taking nearly forever, as it approaches the event horizon (zero-point). All this is observed by the outsider in slowed clock-speed… just like Hawking’s ‘forever-falling’ spaceman. Neutrons are neutrons and they’re all alike.
But alas, the balance of Nature must remain, so then via the zero point, just as any other implosion, the cone of time spits out a nice proton back at us, plus an electron… and an antiparticle that [hand-wave.exe/] represents the anti-matter quadrant of the entire anti/non-anti frameset [unhand-wave/]. Voila! We have then lost a neutron but gained a useful hydrogen atom. Our non-anti-particle home-universe quadrant retains exactly the same mass. We can make a lot of new stuff out of hydrogen and any left-over neutrons on our side… and we do. After-all, we live within the wonderful fore-mentioned replicator.
This is just a quick, rough estimation of course. 😉
Wes
Don’t understand how your question is connected to my comment.
Just in case there is any confusion, my comment about a “forementioned¹” replicator referred to the very first and very appropriate April Fools comment above, by Harsh Gupta, on making replicators or transporters. My belated post was meant in the spirit of our annual April Fools gift from The Physicist (thank you sir).
We do actually live in the greatest replicator of all time however, pardon the pun. And the rest of it actually does touch upon a supposition I made for my own benefit, to understand a plausible configuration for the atomic nucleus… instead of just accepting an inane 1950’s era, randomly mixed weird lump of protons and neutrons. To my satisfaction, I reasoned, deducted and concluded that the atomic nucleus is probably as well organized and simple as the electron valance levels.
I suspect Nature is lazy and always has Her most simple symmetric blueprint by which Her clever replicator works. Pardon my deference to “her as Her”, but I always remember that in matters of which came first, the chicken or the egg, nobody ever thought it was the rooster. It’s like deep down inside, we always knew the gender of our maker. 😉
Wes
fore•men•tioned ¹
Mentioned before: recited or written in a former part of the same discourse or writing
A rooster and a hen are both chickens.
Earlier species evolved into a chicken so it’s egg came first.
Our maker has no gender as we evolved so there is no maker.
Still, I suppose there is nothing wrong in your attempt to inject comedy into a scientific discussion.
Friday fun: The chicken and egg paradox has some interesting asides. What was version 0.9 of a chicken, and when it laid an egg what made a version 1.0?
To use a modern analogy, Bill Gates spoke to Steve Jobs who visited Xerox PARC and saw both the modern computer mouse and GUI. The Mac was born (The Amiga was better) and MS quickly introduced the rotten egg of Windows 1.0. By about version 3.1 (Windows for workgroups) it trudged along to being usable. This is the egg/evolution analogy.
The chicken analogy would be Windows XP just appearing and being standardized, which is consistent with the chicken first analogy. Then molecular biologists came along, and started to tinker with things and made both disasters and incrementally better chickens (I won’t name specific iterations). I am writing this on a Win 10 machine and have Linux distros and the wife likes Mac.
Back to matter: I’ve read the Big Bang was posited by a Belgian Catholic Priest, Georges Lemaître, who shares the name of the discovery with Hubble, who confirmed it. The period at the end of the last sentence is roughly the size of all the mass of the Universe prior to the Big Bang, depending on your display and font. Many things are hard to imagine, and this falls into that category. I think mass is constant, regardless of available energy (I was tempted to use irregardless to trigger the uptight or uplift the pretentious :). I have pet theories of dark matter/energy, but this is a bit long in the tooth as it is.
Have a great weekend!
@THendricks
It has to do with your wave physics. Check out the original solution to Schrodinger’s equation. They wanted matter waves. What did they get? A sorry excuse for a standing wave.
I continue to find it endlessly amusing that ‘hit the thing with another thing’ has been one of the most important scientific methods throughout the entirety of human history, that some of the most advanced science in the world is still done by smashing things together and then looking at the resulting mess.
Want to learn about the fundamental nature of reality? Smash some atoms together REALLY hard and look very carefully at the things that happen.
Want to learn about the geological makeup of another planet or moon or comet or whatever? Smash a solid object into it and look very carefully at the things that happen.
Long ago, one of our ancient ancestors figured out that hitting things with other things, like a deer with a rock, was a good way to get things done.
It still is.
I don’t think the natural selection process creates the exact numerical stages you suggest, such as 90% chicken. There would be a myriad of genetic mutations/events occurring in many individual members of a particular genetic grouping which over a very long time produced many eggs that produced creatures which were closer to the chickens we see today.
I also think that people who lose and gain weight might be confused by your idea that mass is constant.
Your analogy with the development of computers is okay from the standpoint of analogy but it is not a natural selection. It’s a result of human thought processes leading to technological invention.
But I woul also offer this:
I understand that the ability to think like a human, is a result of evolution and invention is an output of human thinking. From this, I can accept that the evolution that produced human thinking, may be the universes most efficient and most successful attempt yet to convert raw data into the more useful construct we call information. I think (probably the most important two words in the universe) our function is to wonder and ponder and debate and invent and learn from error etc etc.
Naming concepts with words like reality, dream, mass, energy, spiritual etc is what we do. We then try to show that these labels are not good enough. If we can’t then the label gains strength, until we find flaws and we need to re-evaluate. If we gain enough confidence in certain labels then we play with the underlying properties and we combine the labels into equations, formulae and even laws. We then continuously test their validity. I think I got the terms ‘infinite variations in infinite combination’ from a Vulcan in an episode of Star Trek. I think this is the universal goal. We constantly search for variation and we always try to combine to create new output. The idea that a super natural god is the owner of all this would be really boring and to me, very disappointing. If the god squad are correct in anyway then I look forward to my own personal oblivion. Science and the property we call thought are for me, the only systems that have the potential to cause a universe to know what it is and why it exists. I apologise for the rather spiritual sound of that last sentence but I choose to differentiate it as scientific spirituality and not religious spirituality.
Your comments are insightful. Please forgive my implication of integral leaps in chickendom. They are naturally gradual, though have been fairly stable through recorded history apart from the fancy ones you see selectively bred at county fairs.
As for the mass creation, I find eating too many cheeseburgers can result in me gaining mass, but it is neither created or destroyed, just transferred.
God would have not wanted automatons programmed to say “You are great!” ad infinitum (I can do that with 100 robots, but it would wear pretty thin after a while). Rather free will, and knowledge beyond instinct and simple speech, to let us learn about things like math, physics, and matter.
Other great philosophical questions are: does a dolphin know it’s wet? Or, why haven’t gorillas evolved because they’ve had as much time as us? Those are probably discussions for another thread, but this one works for me.
-Best Regards and Thank You for the Candor, Dan
Thank you for your ‘fair minded’ debating skills Dan.
I agree matter and probably dark matter is not created or destroyed and that it only changes form or state. Therefore ‘Mass is constant regardless of available energy’ is misleading. Is it not more accurate to suggest ‘The universe only contains that which can be produced by combining the various quanta released due to its birth.’ Nothing outside of that can exist in this universe.
I would suggest that the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent creature makes free will pointless and would only possibly provide entertainment for such a creature. Which is also a contradiction as why would such a creature require
entertainment? Why would such a creature need to create?
I appreciate your free will to offer examples of what you consider ‘great philosophical questions’. I also appreciate that such examples will vary greatly from person to person. For me, I would suggest that a dolphin knows when its wet at it can compare it to how its skin feels when it plays with humans on the surface or when it comes up for air on a sunny day as part of its skin might dry on such an occasion.
I would further suggest that random chance is real and affects which variants combine within a particular instant in time which is why the gorilla’s have not evolved as much as humans have, even though we had had the same time. On occasion, a person is killed and another lives even though they have had the same time on Earth, but a random chance (often blamed on a god) results in one being killed or changing form/state.
Sorry Dan, I forgot to fill in the name field. Please ignore the anonymous label
No worries about the anonymous error, any good discussion is a good one.
Likewise thanks for the compliment on a fair debate, though I think we agree on most points.
One I would also point you to is St. Thomas Aquinas, who rationalized existence in several different ways in his text Summa Theologica (there is an abridged version). In which he posits that every effect has a cause, and that Universes are not randomly sprouting up everywhere (my take on his meaning).
Back to mass, or Mass, the mystery of the acceleration of the Universe apart does lead to one scientific conclusion; entropy. Eventually the Universe will cool, and every particle will become orderly spread around the entire, new larger Universe. That is the ultimate extrapolation and the end of entropy, when all is ordered. I doubt I eat or exercise enough to see it (in a few hundred billion years), but the mass will continue until it decays into a different form of mass or energy.
As for a theological thought, we are not here for entertainment. We have proven through our cruelty as sentient beings that we are often not worthy of existence or forgiveness for our actions. However, the belief of a loving God, rather than a vindictive one, would suggest both the creation of matter, free choice, Universe in motion, and all of the other things we can observe. This brings the question, why do bad things happen to good people. I’ll turn to math. If someone suffers for 78 years, but believes in a loving God and there is an afterlife, 78 divided by infinity is effectively zero suffering.
One final point for a Saturday night is that critics of a creator claim there should be no pain or suffering. If that were true, there could be no mountains (might fall off), no bodies of water deeper than a few millimeters (might drown), no anything (insert cause of death). Basically living on a cue ball or padded room in McDonalds. That’s not life.
Thank you for your comments. It is rare these days to have a fair debate. Bests, Dan
This will not be the last interesting post by the physicist that sidetracks into the god/no god debate. Its an ancient debate and I fully appreciate that most readers find it tiresome and have little interest it contributing to it. I can only beg their indulgence.
I am a believer in the old adage ‘I might not agree with what you say but I will defend with my life, your right to say it’. That said, does not mean that I will never get angry with someone who has fanatical views such as fascism or the more extreme members of the god squad. I have been known to use such terms as ‘evanhellical’ or ‘fruit loop scientologist’ etc but I normally regret such angry terms in a ‘fair debate’.
The more palatable people of faith get a lot of comfort from belief in god and I would never like to deny them that.
Cause and effect is well established but does not preclude random chance. The cause of an event is often random chance. ‘Universes are not randomly sprouting up everywhere.’ I don’t really understand this Dan, as the universe IS ‘everywhere.’ Unless all you mean is you don’t agree with the multiverse theory.
Entropy is again, well established. The fate of the universe may well be ‘the big rip.’
An interesting point here is that if a certain frame of reference (such as quanta travelling at light speed) experiences no distance or time. Then it would seem to follow that Dan’s ‘few hundred billion years’ of time for the big rip to play out would not effect energy quanta such as the photon, if they don’t experience time. I understand that an event can cause a photon to change its state. It can become electric if it falls on a solar panel or it can be absorbed as heat energy etc. But are their photons which have never experienced an event and have only ever existed as light speed quanta since entering the ‘photon’ state. Such could only experience entropy in their own frame of reference but how does that tie up with theories such as the big rip?
‘A loving God’, ‘human cruelty’, ‘the afterlife of no suffering for eternity’ etc.
Again, a very old debate Dan. I can only throw in my pennies worth.
The heaven style afterlife described by some organised religions sounds like hell to me. What would your purpose be in such an existence. Would you spend eternity in deference to this inadequate god who could only have created us to give itself significance. You can only experience pleasure as you know what pain is. There is no pleasure in drinking unless you are thirsty. Eternal pleasure would soon become hell.
As I said, a very old debate.
I am very much in the category of ‘critic of a creator’ although I would prefer the word atheist. As an atheist I do not claim there should be no pain or suffering. I accept Darwin’s work as fact. Our evolution includes the predatorial property. I read somewhere the word evil just means ‘follower of eve’. Something similar for the word dEVil. Is it an act of evil? when a lion rips a wee innocent animal to shreds and then consumes it. I think the answer is no but it is not acceptable for a human to act in ways akin to the way a lion might treat a lamb. The thinking human used the natural categories of predator and prey to create the two alternatives of good and evil or justice and injustice as very useful tools in the pursuit of the creation of progressive and contented human communities. That struggle continues to this day with periodic progression and regression.
I have no fear of death, although like most, I’m scared about how I will die. But I don’t need a super natural, super hero god to offer me an alternative.
Oblivion or ‘no awareness of the passage of time’ (just like a photon then) will do fine for me. In one frame of reference, when I die, the universe ends, as after death, I don’t experience the passage of time, so your few hundred billion years will be instantaneous from my death frame of reference.
Death brings change and variety. A disassembling dead human produces raw materials that can be recycled and recombined into new humans via the procreation process. To me, its mere human arrogance to be convinced that your individual current human persona should be preserved by the universe for as long as possible.
Having said that, I do not rush towards death and I fully support all scientific attempts to improve human lifespan as I enjoy trying to figure things out.
I appreciate this little sidetrack Dan and I have enjoyed your input but as this is a Science forum, I think we should move the debate back to science and leave religion
to be enjoyed by its remaining followers before entropy wipes it out completely or it becomes more akin to or gains full categorisation under a heading such as Hans Christian Anderson.
I hope my last sentence doesn’t offend you too much Dan but I also employ my right to ‘say it’ and blow off a little of my own steam. I again invoke the ‘fair minded’ debate intention that I do accept is also my responsibility.
I like to bill myself as unoffendable, and appreciate your comments as always. We can get back to science proper. One last thought though is that an afterlife is nowhere to be bored (or tire of 72 virgins after a couple years, that could easily turn into hell… oh the nagging), rather a place where the 4th dimension of time disappears. Not the hell of the movie Groundhog Day, but one of continuous wont of nothing, without fear of death, and things we can’t imagine. Wishful thinking, perhaps, but Pascal said if he was right, he’d be there, if he was wrong it would be the same either way. I don’t always follow this site, but let’s catch up on further science topics. Cheers, Dan
Cheers Dan!
Regarding the ‘what was the chicken version 0.9’, there are two things to note.
The first is that evolution is a continuous process, so there wasn’t a ‘version 0.9’ of the chicken, there was a ‘version 0.9000000000000000000000000000000- repeat for a few thousand more zeros’, and every successive generation increases that extremely long version number by 1. Modern chickens aren’t actually version 1.0, they’re version 1.0000- etc -0758123 or something along those lines.
The second thing to note is that ‘version 0.9000-etc’ of the chicken were most likely Dromaeosaurids, which is pretty obvious when you look at image recreations of what Dromaeosaurids are believed to have looked like; they’re basically chickens with teeth.
Go look at a picture of a velociraptor and tell me that isn’t basically an oversized chicken with teeth. You can’t, because velociraptors were totally oversized chickens with teeth. (Or, more accurately, considering they predated chickens, chickens are undersized toothless velociraptors. Think about it.)
The chicken 0.9 was merely an illustrative allusion to software development; though there is an argument for step functions in creatures. I agree with you but didn’t want to wear out the zero key on my keypad; note the true version number on computer or smartphone software (check out the sum digits of a Windows registry and you have the biggest number ever).
Chickens have been remarkably stable over human existence, though there have been noted examples of other species change during human record. That and botany (plant engineering) suggest the opportunity to affect gradual change.
One interesting investigation regarding velociraptors would be their change over the epoch(s) they existed and the fossil record. Also the apparently unchanging perfection of ancient creatures (alligators, sharks, coelacanths, etc.) which are with us today. The biggest unknown, short of accurate carbon dating, would be did they change at all over 10^5 or 10^6 years? When did they turn from being a ferocious predator to tasty dinner treat? (Please forgive my levity disregarding the sands of time, I know it’s not that simple.) Great master’s thesis for anyone who studies such things.
Many comments, here, relate energy and mass as components of matter. Could someone explain:
What is energy? How and where does it exist in free form or in association with matter? What is the exact mechanism for energy to change its form or to create matter? How energy came into being in the first place?
What is mass? How and where does it exist in association with matter? What is the exact mechanism for energy to create mass? What is the mass of a non-accelerating body or when there is no external force on it?
All great questions, which are the beauty of exploring math and physics. There was an experiment done recently (sorry I don’t have the reference) but the researchers demonstrated the wave nature of an ~1000 atom molecule. In other words, it was at two places at the same time; not unlike a two slit photon experiment. To address part of your questions, we are all both matter and waves of energy. If a large molecule can demonstrate wave-like characteristics, I’m sure my mass can as well, though it would have trouble fitting through some of the smaller slits.
As to origin of energy/mass… I’ll have to circle back on that. (I hope that phrase doesn’t cheapen my opinions.) In Einstein’s E=MC^2, where did the E come from, where did the M come from, why is there a speed of C, and why is it squared? The only true answer is … aarrrghhh! {the author of this note has been sacked} .
(I am hopeful everyone gets the reference and humor:)
If you look at the previous questions section to the right of this section. You will find questions such as What is:
Energy
Mass
Light
Have all been posted before. Many previously posted questions are very much worth reading along with all the comments posted. Better than doing many current online cosmology courses.
Absolutely! I wish I took the time to read all of the excellent answers and comments contained within the right column. I see the Big Bang Theory as a bit of a hand waving/whistling past the graveyard canard. Bye no means criticism, it is an excellent theory. But it boils down to the old journalistic practice of who, what, where, when, how, and why.
Several of which have been distilled: Who? unknown or unbelieved. What? origin of all this matter and energy. Where? here (though there may be a historic commemorative plate at the center of the the Big Bang reading “You’re welcome, Abba.” (not the Swedish supergroup, as far as I know)). When, as a Cosmologist or a very educated cosmetologist may indicate as billions of years. How? Who knows; and Why?… look to the right or ponder it a bit longer, not all the answers may be there, but many.
@Dan_of_Reason
I wouldn’t say that chickens have been remarkably stable over human history; chickens are domesticated junglefowl, specifically Red Junglefowl, plus some hybridization with the other three kinds of junglefowl. For most of human history, chickens did not exist, that alone means that they have changed substantially more than most similar animals.
Modern junglefowl are basically the same as the ancient junglefowl that were turned into chickens around ~5400 years ago, chickens on the other hand are quite different from their junglefowl ancestors, though by no means different enough to be unable to interbreed.
There is also far more variance in physical appearance between different breeds of chicken than between the different species of junglefowl, and new breeds of chicken are constantly being created by breeders.
So chickens have been substantially less stable over the course of human history than junglefowl, and that is to be expected for any domesticated species. Domestication is a form of artificial selection, a way of influencing evolution to change certain animals in ways that benefit us rather than the animal directly. Domesticated species are thus, by their very nature, less stable than wild species because they have been designed under the assumption that humans will be caring for their needs.
For a simple example; goldfish released into the wild rapidly revert to their natural dark brown\black coloring within only a few generations, both because the gold coloring is genetically unstable and because goldfish that aren’t black are far more likely to get eaten and fail to reproduce, thus being naturally selected against.
Chickens are the same; left in the wild to go feral and they quite quickly revert towards their Red Junglefowl roots in both appearance and behavior, though their hybrid genetics ensures a few differences like leg color.
Keep in mind, when looking at the changes of dinosaurs throughout the fossil record, you’re looking at the differences between animals -millions-, if not tens of millions of years apart. In comparison, chickens have existed for -less than six thousand years-.
Evolution is capable of going far more rapidly than it usually does through natural selection, because the environment does not usually change very quickly (outside of the occasional but regular instances where it very abruptly -does- do that). Artificial selection in the form of domestication on the other hand accomplished more changes to the Red Junglefowl in less than six thousand years than natural selection did in the last million years.
@Neruz
A reasonable requirement would be a species would have evolved when it can no longer procreate with the progenitor. So horse and donkey gives sterile mule. Separate species?
An attempt to nudge this back to Mass/Energy, but my question is still a bit of a sidetrack and it will probably reveal my limited grasp of Physics. The answer is probably a simple one but I have not found a source which clearly explains it to me.
Eggs are actually a useful vehicle for my question:
I understand that heat energy can turn a solid into a liquid or a liquid into a gas but how come it can also turn a liquid into a solid such as happens when you fry or boil an egg or cook a flour mixed with water etc. I understand the chemistry behind this. I get that this is how the 10% protein content of an egg (long chains of amino acids) reacts to heat energy. An egg is 90% water. Why does that content not just all steam away. Why is a fried egg not much smaller that it is (it seems much bigger than 10% protein could produce.). I know the heat is causing a ‘fusion’ of the protein atoms into the fried mass but I don’t understand the amount of mass in the fried egg considering the 90% water.
@Stephen kelly
Thanks for the suggestion. However, none of them gives definite answers to my questions. Neither do physics textbooks.
Thanks anyway.
Nainan
@Nainan
I thought the post on ‘What is energy’ was informative.
I don’t think you will ‘definitive’ answers on
‘What is mass’
‘What is energy’
As nobody really knows. The best on offer is that they are properties of matter.
I would suggest its acceptable to state that energy and mass are properties of matter.
Energy described as ‘that which allows work to be done’ is not bad and adds strength to labels like kinetic, potential, chemical and also aids other labels such as electromagnetic, radiation etc.
Mass can spontaneously appear in high energy fields and in accordance with E=MC2.
Mass is baryonic in that it is substantive and made of protons, neutrons and electrons.
“What is energy? How and where does it exist in free form or in association with matter?”
Free form means ‘not conforming to a regular or formal structure or shape’.
So taking ‘How does it(energy) exist in free form.’
Energy exists in waveform and in particle ‘quanta'(like photons) so I don’t think its free form.
“Where does it(energy) exist in free form”
Well the answer would be nowhere in a state of free form and ‘all over the universe’ in waveform and particle form.
“What is the exact mechanism for energy to change its form or to create matter? ”
All I can think of is M=E/C2. Now I know E is the energy label and C is light (a form of energy) So it seems if you have different propertied of energy interacting with each other then this can produce another property called mass. The energy particle that causes the change has been suggested as the higgs boson which is a zero spin photon.
But like you I don’t understand ‘the exact mechanism’.
How energy came into being in the first place?
The best we have to choose from at the moment is
The big bang
Interdimensional vibrating strings
Other lesser know theories
Or if your desperate, God did it
“What is the mass of a non-accelerating body or when there is no external force on it”
I think its zero or ‘weightless’.
I have probably not helped much in answering your questions Nainan. I may even not even have understood them very well. You may even use such terms as ‘No shit Sherlock’ in response to some my sentences. My knowledge of cosmology is limited and my degree is old and in Computing but I hope you continue to enjoy seeking the solutions in the same way that I do and you don’t accept anything as fact until all your questions about it are answered enough to convince.
To quote Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s character of Sherlock Holmes: “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?”. Not that I am desperate.
@ Nainan
Sorry, One of my sentences was slightly dense, in that a weightless object still has mass.
So zero mass is not what I meant to suggest. An object in free space not affected by any force to accelerate or move it, still has mass and density. I assume that you could call it a ‘rest mass’ and its a measure of how ‘tightly packed’ its baryons are.
@Dan_Of_Reason
You said you must eliminate the impossible. In my opinion, there goes god.
Time will tell. I respect your opinion and have a good friend who is atheist. There is some historical evidence of a Deity, even from non-Judeo-Christian sources and it would account for a lot in the creation of matter/energy plausibility. I agree, more faith than demonstrable scientific fact, but were there God, I think think that is how it would occur.
And don’t worry, if I read anyone write ‘agree to disagree’ again I’m going to puke so I will not offer that as a phrase. Bests as Always, Dan
@Dan_of_reason
Thank you for your kind words.
I hope you and all people of faith understand that I find the theory of god completely implausible but I freely admit I cannot disprove it. I understand how central faith is to the lives of many people but I cannot ignore the overwhelming folklore that the god stories are based on. To me, faith in a god comes from human fear of the unknown.
In history, there are many many examples of people who learned to be altruistic because of their faith. Sadly there is an equal if not greater number of people in history who have used their god to abuse others. This continues to this day.
I watched a drama on TV many years ago that was based on the idea of the second coming. Jesus returns in a modern day setting. I loved a section played out near the end of the show where the Jesus character is being chastised by a non-believer. At one point the atheist says ‘you did not create us, we created you through fear.’ The Jesus character responded with ‘well I can go away, forever, but understand this. Don’t look to me anymore when bad things happen. Don’t pray to me for help. You are on your own. ‘ I agreed with this message. The human race will not grow up until we take full responsibility for our own lives. Free will needs to be owned by us, not granted to us by a super hero god. The natural human reaction to something calling itself god it to try to overthrow it. Our nature is to constantly test facts/truths/claims.
So I personally feel that rejection of the God concept is my first responsibility as a progressive human.